fugitive peace

Just got in from the swish opening reception in Bethlehem for the Palestine Investment Conference. As Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, said, “We are throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” Well, a lot of those who turned up seemed to be not foreign investors but expatriate Palestinians who took advantage of a brief moment of Israeli openness to get a permit to visit home. Still, that’s a party by anyone’s standards.

I spent a bit of the previous afternoon with one of the real investors, the CEO of Qatari Diar, which plans to co-build Rawabi, a new Palestinian town for 40,000 people on a hillside about 15 minutes drive north of Ramallah. I didn’t think there were any hills in the West Bank that hadn’t been conquered by either Palestinians or settlers, but there we were, scrambling over the stones while the Qataris’ Palestinian business partner described the layout and gushed over the breathtaking views (you could even see the towers of Tel Aviv silhouetted in the sunset). I and another journalist recorded the CEO talking about how important it was to him to invest “with our brothers in Palestine” and saying that the symbolism mattered more than the profits.

As we talked to him a minion walked up and handed us each little boxes with “Balenciaga” and the Qatari Diar logo embossed on them. We fingered them nervously. Our employers both have policies about accepting gifts, but you don’t offend a senior Gulf businessman who is probably related to the royal family just after you’ve met him.

The interviews over, we walked back to the cars parked on the other side of the hill, where we discovered that one of the Palestinians had left his SUV in neutral and it had rolled 50 metres down into the ravine, where it lay with its windscreen wipers waving in a forlorn distress signal. The owner seemed remarkably sanguine. My colleague backed his car out gingerly.

Back on the road, we opened the little boxes. Turned out we needn’t have worried. Qatari Diar may be willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on its Palestinian brethren, but when it comes to journalists it makes do with the cheapest possible fake-leather notebook (and rightly so). Balenciaga might not be too happy, though.

The EU has some serious egg on its face this week after the Gaza power fiasco.

The European Commission pays an Israeli company (Dor Alon) to provide fuel to Gaza’s only power station. The fuel is turned into electricity; the electricity gets distributed; Gazans pay the electric company; the electric company pays taxes to the PA. Someone whispered in the commission’s ear that Hamas, being in charge of Gaza, was somehow getting hold of these taxes instead.

Panic. Hamas is on the EU’s terrorist list. The EU cannot give money to Hamas. And providing money to an Israeli firm that provides fuel to a Palestinian firm that collects money from Palestinians that then goes to Hamas is of course practically the same thing. It has to stop at once. And stop it did: The commission suspended payments to Dor Alon - so fast that senior commission officials only learned about it from the media. And the power plant, which provides about a third of Gaza’s electricity, shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of people suffering blackouts at the height of summer.

Except that it seems nobody checked whether the allegations were true before throwing the switch. By today the money was flowing again and the power was back on. There has been a show of setting up “joint Commission/PA audits to ensure that fuel aid in Gaza remains properly managed,” according to the commission’s press release. This is a rather thin fig-leaf (note the “remains”) for the fact that actually, no improper management was found.

Hamas accused Fatah of cooking up the story, which they suggest was based on the fact that Hamas men have been going door to door trying to make people pay their bills and investigating what they allege is corruption at the power company. I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly where the Europeans got their information. But it’s clearly the latest in many cases where the fact that foreign governments will not talk to Hamas has made them reliant on partisan and dubious sources for their knowledge of what is actually going on in Gaza and the West Bank.